Info about 2.2.2022, the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ulysses

 A special information:

As you surely know, the literary world will be celebrating on 2.2.2022 the 100th anniversary of the publication of Ulysses, the icon of Modern literature. The Zurich Joyce Foundation has announced a variety of events. Details are available on the website of the Foundation. 

Many a newspaper/magazine has carried articles in the past few days on this milestone. Some of the interesting articles are: 
1. "Dangerous, voyeuristic, transgressive, exciting: Anne Enright on James Joyce's Ulysses at 100", The Guardian, 29 January 2022
2. "Wer hat Angst vor Joyce?", Manfred Papst, NZZ am Sonntag, 29 Januar 2022, S. 61
3. "In a Word . . . Ulysses", Patsy McGarry, Irish Times, 29 January 2022

Additional events of interest:
1. The Washington DC Public Library is hosting the virtual event, "Ulysses - A Conversation with Ambassador Dan Mulhall" that will be streamed on YouTube. Details here.
Watch the video of this highly interesting conversation here.
2. Details about the number of events planned by RTE, Ireland's National Public Service Media, are available here.
3. The bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach, was instrumental in getting Ulysses published on 2.2.1922. To commemorate the event, Friends of Shakespeare and Company are bringing out podcasts of the reading of Ulysses. These are available freely on the sites where you listen to podcasts. The first episode will be available on 2.2.2022 and the last on 16.6.2022, this year's Bloomsday.
4. Watch a short video on Sylvia Beach about publishing James Joyce's Ulysses here.
5. BBC Radio 3 will also be broadcasting short talks, starting tonight at 22.45 with Anne Enright reading from Telemachus. Readings from many other writers will follow. Details are here.

Of course, the book, Ulysses for the Uninitiated, is meant for those who want to try to read Joyce's masterpiece but are hesitant because they have heard/read that this is a difficult book to read! Oh, how much they miss!!

Online reading, Thursday, 27 January 2022 (End of episode 15)

Today's reading reached the end of Circe, episode 15.

Summary:

Outside the brothel, Stephen has got into altercation with two soldiers. One of them, Private Carr rushes at Stephen, striking him in the face. Bloom is trying to get Stephen away from the scene, when two policemen arrive. Soon Corny Kelleher also arrives in a hackney. With the help of Kelleher, Bloom manages to get rid of the police. Kelleher, who thinks of giving a ride to Stephen, gives up the idea when he hears that Stephen lives far away in Sandycove. Even the horse that is pulling the hackney wants to go hohohohome.

Things start to quieten down. So far the episode was brimming with people, sometimes in reality, more often in fantasy. Now only two are left: Bloom and Stephen. Stephen is still lying on the ground. Bloom tries to wake him up, calling his name. In his muddled up state, Stephen wakes up murmuring black panther (Telemachus, episode 1), vampire (Proteus, episode 3), and singing words of the poem Who goes with Fergus by W. B. Yeats (Telemachus, episode 1). Bloom, on hearing the words - Fergus now, shadows, the woods, . .  . dim sea - thinks that Stephen is thinking of a girl named Ferguson.

Again suddenly we are back in the world of fantasy. Against the dark wall a figure appears slowly , a fairy boy of eleven,  . . . dressed in an Eton suit with glass shoes like Cinderella and a little bronze helmet. On his suit he has diamond and ruby buttons. He is carrying a slim ivory cane. It is Rudy, Bloom's deceased son. Bloom had once imagined that his son will walk one day beside Molly in an Eton suit. (In the language of gems, the diamond has the power of making men courageous and magnanimous and of protecting them from evil spirits. Ruby is symbolic of a cheerful mind, and it works as a preservative of health and as an amulet against poison, sadness, and evil thoughts; Gifford, 15.4965-66). The bronze helmet, the ivory cane and lambkin hint that Rudy appears in the role of Hermes (Mercury).

All this symbolism brings together on one hand Homer's Odyssey and Joyce's Ulysses. When Odysseus approaches Circe's palace, he is stopped by Hermes. Here Hermes appears when our Odysseus leaves Circe's palace. On the other hand, the appearance of Rudy shows that Stephen is a potential son of Bloom. Seeing Rudy, all the paternal protective instinct is awakened in Bloom. The last part of Ulysses will deal with what happens to this father - son duo. For us, readers, reading this episode has been, to put it extremely mildly, an interesting, although pretty bewildering, literary journey.

Online reading, Thursday, 20 January 2022 (15.4660)

The reading stopped with "On fire, on fire!" (15.4660)

We are nearing the end of the current episode. Stephen has run out of Bella Cohen's brothel. Bloom pacifies Bella and paying for the chandelier damaged by Stephen, runs after him, finding him outside, having got into trouble with two British soldiers, Private Carr and Private Compton.

In another bout of fantasy, many characters we had met earlier reappear: The citizen (Cyclops, episode 12), the croppy boy (Sirens, episode 11), Rumbold, demon barber (there he was master barber; Cyclops, episode 12), Patrice and Kevin Egan (Proteus, episode 3), Edward the Seventh and even a composite character named aptly Don Emile Patrizio Franz Rupert Pope Hennessy!

And there is a lot of Irish history on these pages. For example, the song the citizen sings (15.4525) is not only a parody of a 1830 song but is also a reference to the trial of two Sinn Feiners in 1921. The ballad, Croppy Boy, which is about the 1798 Irish uprising, crops up again (15.4534). Irish expatriates such as Kevin Egan are also part of the scene. The most important of all the figures that appear is that of Old Gummy Granny. She, the old woman, who is Ireland itself, appears when the heads of the assembled women - Kitty, Biddy, etc - coalesce. But old Gummy Granny has all the typical attributes - toadstool, sugarloaf hat - of the Irish fairy. Stephen recognizes her.

Online reading, Thursday, 13 January 2022 (15.4259)

The reading stopped at "After him!" (15.4259) 

Summary:

We feel on these pages quite bewildered at first, till we realize that the various happenings we see here are really echoes of earlier episodes. Not only do we meet many characters we had met earlier (and whom we do not expect to meet in the brothel) - Simon Daedalus (episode 5), Mr Deasy (episode 2), Maginni, the dance teacher (episode 10), Professor Goodwin, the piano teacher (episode 4), Buck Mulligan and finally Stephen's dead mother (episode 1) - but we also witness bracelets and hours of the day acquiring voices, and we encounter, in the brothel, scenes of fox hunting as well as horse racing! It looks as if Stephen is also hallucinating just as Bloom did earlier.

When Zoe asks Stephen to give them some parleyvoo, he starts off in great style, talking supposedly like how a Frenchman talks in English, when out of the blue he says, “I dreamt of a watermelon.” This is an echo of episode 3, in which Stephen on the Sandymount strand thinks of a dream he dreamt the previous night. According to Gifford*, melons are also the fruits the children of Israel long for in their wanderings. 

The atmosphere turns gay with Professor Goodwin playing the piano, and dance steps being called out by the dance teacher, Professor Maginni to the song, My girl is a Yorkshire girl. Stephen, who starts to dance with Zoe, Florry is admonished by his father to think of his mother's people.

The word, mother, is the cue to what follows. Stephen's mother is dead. So naturally, he, while dancing, thinks of the dance of death.  Stephen's mother, emaciated, rises stark through the floor like a ghost. We are back on top of the Martello tower (episode 1). With Buck Mulligan. Now in a jester’s dress of puce and yellow. And instead of bearing a bowl of lather, he is carrying a smoking buttered split scone. Stephen is still smarting at Mulligan's saying, "She’s beastly dead." He is also full of remorse at not having fulfilled his mother’s wish for prayer at her deathbed. His mother’s ghost does not make it easier for him and asks him to repent. He does not. He will not serve, and says, "Non serviam!"

The circle is complete. With an episode ending the middle section of Ulysses, we are back at the beginning of the novel.

* See Ulysses Annotated by Gifford, 1989, Univ. of California Press, P. 61, 3.367-69

Online reading, Thursday, 6 January 2022 (15.3836)

The reading stopped at " ... after his death..." (15.3836)

Summary*

By this time, we, the readers, have more or less got used to the 'craziness' - rather, the incredible creativity of Joyce - we experience in this episode. If we want to thoroughly appreciate Joyce's creativity, we need to remember almost every word we have so far read in the book. We need to be prepared for inanimate objects (yews, waterfalls) and animals (staggering bob, nanny goat, black liz), for deceased persons (Shakespeare, Virag), mythical persons (nymph) and persons who are really are not part of the gathering (Boylan, Councillor Nannetti, Father Dolan, John Conmee, Marion aka Molly, Mina Kennedy, Lydia Douce, The boots) to spring into the conversation. We also need to recognise the clues that lead to the 'appearance' (and quick disappearance) of objects and persons amongst the people gathered in Bella Cohen's brothel. (For instance, Shakespeare makes an appearance when Lynch says, "The mirror up to nature" that is a saying in Hamlet; Father Dolan appears when Lynch mentions pandybat, which in itself a reference to Joyce's earlier work The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.)  We need to discern how in this episode fantasy (the conversation between the nymph and Bloom) intermingles with reality (Bloom asking Zoe to give him back the potato that was a relic of his mamma) and to learn to distinguish between the two.

*Please note that the posting of summaries which had to be discontinued in September 2021 will resume from this week.